What a lease actually includes
A lease bundles the lights, the install, in-season maintenance, takedown, and off-season storage into one seasonal price. The installer owns commercial-grade strands, sizes them to your roofline, and swaps any failures during the season, so a dark section gets fixed without a call from you. You are effectively renting a lit house on a schedule. The recurring cost is higher than owning, but nothing about storage, breakage, or re-measuring ever lands on you.
What buying your own really costs
Buying lowers the year-over-year price but shifts the burden. You store bulky strands somewhere dry for eleven months, you eat the cost of failures, and retail-grade lights often degrade after a couple of Midwest winters. If you still hire out the hang, you are paying labor on top of ownership; if you hang them yourself, you are back on a ladder at the second-story eave. Owning makes sense for handy homeowners with a stable display and storage space.
How to decide
Choose a lease if you value never handling the lights, want maintenance covered, or have a tall or complex roofline. Choose to buy if you have secure storage, a simple display you like, and the time and comfort to manage it. A useful middle path for owners who love the look but hate the hassle is permanent architectural lighting: a one-time install that removes both the annual hang and the storage problem entirely.
Where this leaves you. Whichever option you land on, the number still depends on the property. What the same work is modeled to cost near you shows how the choice plays out across the towns we publish, and what to have ready before you ask is the short list that gets you one. If the comparison you are actually weighing is seasonal against a fixed system, the permanent lighting guide is the one to read.
Ownership decides who handles the unglamorous half — removal and off-season storage.